Chapter 25 #2
“But he left you again, for America.”
“How could he not? He was able-bodied. He would have had to fight, and possibly die, in the war. And he needed to go. After
what happened, the situation with our father had become untenable for Tu?n. They’d always had an uneasy relationship. They were both balls of fire, full of temper. My paralysis worsened everything.
Ba blamed Anh Tu?n for what he saw as my lost potential. It didn’t matter how unjust it was. Ba came to hate Anh Tu?n and, eventually, my brother came to hate himself.”
“You didn’t want to come to America?”
“I’d met Linh and I didn’t want to leave, even if I could have, so Tu?n came home to me when he could. He always said he wanted to move back to Viet Nam for good. The American dream failed him, it seems.”
“It usually does.”
“But he had you girls and your mother. He stayed in Wisconsin for you.”
“He did his best?” Bitterness, that familiar old seasoning, clung to her words.
Ki`êu reached over to take her hand. “And I can also understand that it wasn’t enough. I’m not here to apologize for my brother. Only to tell you the truth of him as I know it. We are all demons and angels both. It is the project of our lives to hold these contradictions.”
There was a faraway rumble of thunder, a hint of the rainy season that still hung over south Viet Nam. Ki`êu studied the clouds. They were kissed with a soft gray, the luminescent highlight of an elephant’s ear. Every so often, there
was a distant flicker in the sky. Vivi had the impression of a bare bulb swinging against clapboard, its diffuse light growing
and retracting in the push and pull of the wind.
She said, “My sister and I discovered something about our family. It’s a bit of a mystery.”
“Intriguing.”
“I wonder if you could help me trace the genealogy.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Your father was Huy,” she began. He nodded. “Which means your grandmother was Ng?c.”
“Yes. She’d adopted Huy, the way I eventually adopted Khánh.”
“And Huy’s biological mother: Was she Ng?c’s sister, Tam?”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “You know?”
“I’ll be honest. I wasn’t here initially to speak about my father. I began this journey because of Tam. They said that her life was tragic.”
“You’ve heard of the family curse?”
“Bits and pieces. I’d like to hear it from you.”
Another warning rumble.
“Ever since Tam’s drowning, our family has coddled our fear of water.
Hard to avoid it altogether, living so near the H?u Giang, and yet we manage.
As you might have guessed, our father’s birth was a scandal in the town.
Tam was an unmarried mother and prone to sadness and oddity.
Everyone was a little afraid of her. Her drowning only made people
more fearful. So Huy grew up in the shadow of her death, which was as mysterious as her life. If he’d any solace, it came
from his adopted mother, Ng?c. A more good-hearted soul you’d never meet. If not for her—well, none of us might exist.”
“She took care of Huy until she married?”
“Even then, she brought my father with her to be raised as one of her own. Such an act of love tied us all together. Huy was
lucky he did not drown with his mother. So much tragedy in those days. Lost children, lost mothers. A generation of mourning.”
“And Tam’s death, people think it was accidental?”
Vivi felt the brush of déjà vu. She’d asked this question, many times, of her own father’s death. Maybe that was their true
family curse. Not a fear of water, but a destiny of unknowing.
“That’s more difficult to say. There was a note, but my grandmother Ng?c never believed her sister died by suicide.
She didn’t believe Tam died at all, truth be told, even though everyone thought she was delusional.
Ng?c said she could still feel Tam’s presence.
A sister knows such things, she insisted. ”
“Was there no body?” Vivi knew the answer but teased it along anyway.
“None was ever found. It’s not uncommon for things to float out to the delta, then beyond the reach of understanding, but
there are always those who need evidence. The evidence wasn’t enough to satisfy all.”
“What did those people think happened?”
He pressed his lips together, disapproving. “Some of the more fanciful in our circle believed that Tam had been taken by a river wraith, then transformed into a creature of the water, fated to roam her ancestral home for her
sins. Growing up, we teenage boys would dare one another to seek the spirit of our grandmother. Maybe the kids still do. They
said if you saw her reflection in the river, she’d pull you in, and you’d become a wraith too.”
In her mind’s eye, Vivi saw the cool planes of a mirror, a river’s deceptively smooth surface. All the doubled versions of
the universe, caught through unlikely openings.
“And that’s where your accident happened,” she said.
“Fate can be eerie. It’s a funny thing. Your father was curious about Tam too. His seemed to be a late-in-life obsession, one he undertook in the months before his death. He’d write with a million
questions about Tam and Ng?c, none of which I could answer with any satisfaction. I never knew why he was so drawn to our grandmother.”
Then Vivi told him what she knew about Tam, the woman who became K. P. Ly. The woman who, she was certain, they referred to as the foreigner. Ki`êu was incredulous, but he didn’t dismiss her theories. He marveled that there was a famous artist in their lineage. It explained
Tu?n’s talent, which seemed to have sprouted out of cement, a shoot without origin.
She promised to show him her translations of Tam’s journal. After all, he had claim to the offering too, whatever it was.
“Can you tell me where the Old House was?” she asked.
“It’s still there. Not, actually, so far as one would think. But the building isn’t very safe. You shouldn’t go alone.”
“I’ll take my sister. But I must see it.”
“I know you do.”
On the way back, Ki`êu allowed Vivi to wheel him down the path, then up the ramp toward the house. He patted the hand that lay near his shoulder.
“You’re home, Vivi,” he said. “No matter what brought you here, my brother would be glad that we’ve met.”
Back in the house, the family had rearranged the bedroom assignments. They’d insisted that the sisters stay the night and
join the festivities in the morning. They could borrow clothes from the cousins and aunts. While Vivi was with Ki`êu, Calla had accepted on their behalf.
Vivi couldn’t be annoyed when she saw Calla. She’d let someone put her hair in curlers and had changed into an áo bà ba that a cousin had loaned her. Looking right at home. She was dipping slices of green mango into mu?i ?t and held one out to Vivi.
“Can we please?” Calla cajoled.
“One night.”
“We can start with that.” She winked.
Impulsively, Vivi reached over and hugged Calla, pressing her sister’s warm head near her heart. Ki`êu’s stories had underlined the fragility of life, how easy it was to lose what you most loved.
A beat later, Calla wriggled free. “Why are you so obsessed with me?”
After they ate dinner with the family and settled into a spare room, Calla leapt across Vivi on the bed to claim the side
closest to the window, the cooler side. They faced each other. Vivi smelled the grassy sweetness of pandan syrup on her breath.
A slick of sweat articulated the baby hairs near her temple into black crosshatches.
Across from them, on another bed, a set of visiting cousins slept back-to-back, thighs wrapped around long body pillows. They
reminded Vivi of caterpillars twisting around twigs. Their snores wound around the sisters, muffling their conversation.
“Aren’t you glad we came?” Calla whispered.
“It’s been illuminating.”
“We have an uncle. Cousins.”
“More of Dad’s secrets.”
“His paintings, though,” Calla said. “They’re beautiful.”
“They’re fine.” Vivi was lying. Earlier that night, Ki`êu had shown the sisters the rest of Tu?n’s art and she had privately marveled at each. Landscapes, mostly, done with precision and skill. His palette was consistent,
his vision true. She struggled to understand how someone who could see the world so clearly could also fail to understand
his own limitations when it came to his family.
Calla kicked her lightly in the shin. “Why are you so mad at him still?”
“Why aren’t you?”
“You were never so angry at Mom when she left.”
“I didn’t have time to be angry. I was busy making sure you were taken care of. Because he disappeared into a bottle every night.”
“So that’s it, then, you’ll never forgive him?”
“He didn’t ask for my forgiveness.”
“Maybe you weren’t ready to listen.”
They stared at each other, sheets of blame laid in the space between them. Finally, Calla faltered. She looked away first. But the victory felt hollow to Vivi. She didn’t want to win, she only wanted to be understood.
“Tomorrow,” Vivi said. “After the wedding. We’ll go to Tam’s house then.”
Calla adjusted her pillow. “Sure, okay. But what if we stayed for a while? Here. With our family. What if this was what we’d
been missing all along?”
“And the offering?”
“There’s always time.”
“Now we’re in no rush?”
“Can’t you hear the call?”
“What call?”
“Destiny.”
“I can’t with you, Madame Clairvoyant.”
“You’ll see. Something bigger than us is waiting in this town.”
Vivi shut her eyes and thought of the teenage boys who’d tried to catch Tam’s ghostly reflection in the river. How they imagined they heard her too. Were they the mad ones? Or was it Vivi, so cut off
from the possibility of things she couldn’t understand?
A creature whistled in the darkness—a bird, a beast, a human—and she strained her ears toward the sound, as if it would tell
her something new. But she simply couldn’t hear the same things her sister did. Not destiny, not promises from beyond the
grave. Maybe she never could. Their psychic alienation, once a pond, now a yawning and uncrossable ocean, became too much
for her.
“Bee?” Calla tried.
Vivi pretended to be asleep. After a moment, Calla turned, and they rested inches apart, feet touching like a pair of twinned
embryos.